◆ The NFL players kneeling and Pres. Trump’s ferocious response have raised hard issues, once again, about race, class, patriotism, and other central questions of American life.

One of my lifelong friends–and someone who has devoted his life to helping others–read my previous posts on these issues and asked whether I was somehow excusing Pres. Trump for his role in the NFL controversy. Was I saying that Pres. Obama had started this divisive talk, shifting the onus from Trump’s speech in Alabama and his Tweets?

Short answer: No, I’m not. But let me share my other thoughts. I thank him for prompting this post.

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It’s been a long time coming

This divisive talk didn’t start with Trump calling out the NFL.

It didn’t start with Obama calling out the Cambridge Police.

Both made things worse, but it didn’t really start with anyone.

It’s been bubbling up for a long time.

As I have made clear, I think Trump’s language about these issues is terrible and is beneath the office he holds.

Nor do I like the President of the United States calling for boycotts of private businesses, especially when people are invoking their free-speech rights.

On these issues, my complaints about Pres. Obama are relatively mild.

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The Academy has Made Things Worse . . . Much Worse

My bigger complaint is with the academic left which, for years, has attacked the American Dream–in principle as well as in practice–and fundamentally undermined the very idea of E Pluribus Unum. If you say you favor an American Melting Pot, you would be laughed out of any top department of political science or sociology. You wouldn’t have ever been hired in anthropology or the humanities if the faculty knew those views in advance. They would consider you a troglodyte, and think you couldn’t spell the word. You would kill your job chances as surely as asking the Dean what his Zodiac sign was.

These educators have played ethnic-division and identity politics for decades, partly because they think these groups are victims, partly because they want to make sure these groups see themselves as victims, and partly because they want to mobilize them politically. One key point here is that they do not see people as Americans but as hyphenated Americans, and they do not see them as individuals but as members of groups–victimized groups.

The Democratic Party plays a pernicious role here. Their longtime strategy has been to appeal separately to each group and tailor policies to provide government largess for each one. That gives the Democrats a vested stake in seeing that Hispanics, Blacks, Gays, Public Sector Workers, and so on see themselves primarily as members of that beleaguered, victimized subgroup. (Of course, both parties provide largess to major contributors, and big business is at the head of the line.)

The intellectual backing for this Democratic Party strategy has been provided by the academic left. They see an America divided into victimized groups. What unites them, in this view, is that they face the same hegemonic oppressors. They say that in course after course, article after article, and its fruits can be seen in the coalition of progressive activists on campus. What else would bring hard-line Muslims and Gay Rights Advocates together, save a common enemy? This academic ideology of identity/victim politics dovetails with the Democrats’ strategy of sub-group appeals for votes.

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Now Comes the Populist Pushback

What has been happening for the past few years is populist pushback against this viewpoint and against an elite political leadership grouped in a few enclaves and increasingly divorced from the broader population politically, socially, and geographically.

This popular pushback is not led by the rich–the alleged oppressors in the academic tale. It doesn’t come from established conservatives. They want predictable, center-right or center-left governance. Jeb or Hillary, not Bernie or Donald.

The pushback comes from an angry lower-middle-class, mostly white but with many others. They are patriotic to the bone.They don’t like people disrespecting their country, constantly running it down, or thinking that Washington always knows best. If Washington knows best, why are their lives so hard?

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are now facing a federal investigation for violating civil rights.

The driver of the deadly car, to be arraigned today, will be looked at closely to see if he was part of a conspiracy

Pres. Trump still being excoriated (across the political spectrum) for his failure to single out the neo-Nazis and supremacists in his statement condemning the violence

National Security Adviser McMaster calls the act “terrorism,” and Ivanka Trump condemns the supremacists in clear language, at the outset

More attention is now focusing on the failure of the police to intervene and stand between the opposing groups. They appear to have “stood down,” much like the police in Baltimore.

We need to know why

We need to have a clear set of “best practices” for police in these dangerous confrontations

Comment: It is shameful that the President did not speak out as clearly as his daughter. Yes, the left-wing and anarchist Antifada was there and did fight, but the main responsibility for violence belongs to the extreme right in this case. In other cases, when the responsibility belongs elsewhere, the President should condemn that, too, and do so in clear language.

In an editorial, the state-owned China Daily newspaper said Trump was asking too much of China over North Korea….

Trump’s “transactional approach to foreign affairs” was unhelpful, it said, while “politicizing trade will only exacerbate the country’s economic woes, and poison the overall China-U.S. relationship.” –Washington Post

Comment: China is doing the minimum to avoid becoming the focus of international pressure, but not enough to really change North Korean policy.

◆ Ooooops! Next shoe drops in Google’s controversy over women in tech, and that shoe is polished with irony:

Google uses the event to identify candidates for potential employment, recruiting tech wizards from all over the world—from the Philippines and Japan, all the way over to Russia, Sweden, and across the ocean to Latin America and the United States….

Every year, tens of thousands of would-be programming masters sign up for the competition—solving programming puzzles in record time. Only the best of the best make it to the final stage…..

Based on merit alone, the Code Jam does not make any considerations to contestants’ race, gender, political affiliation, or social status. It’s a test of pure skill. –Daily Caller

Comment: One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was the shift in how people are selected for top jobs and prizes–away from status and caste (are you an aristocrat? a member of the dominant race or religion?) and toward merit-based selection.

That achievement is now being challenged without intellectual clarity. That is, some favor affirmative action because it will “level the playing field” and so allow true merit to shine. Others think of it as a benefit that is owed to groups formerly discriminated again; that approach is inherently opposed to merit-based selection. So is retaining preferences well into a person’s career, by which time merit should have already been apparent.

◆ The dominating story of the day, naturally, is the deliberate automobile attack by a white nationalist on counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one and injuring scores more. Two more were killed when a police helicopter crashed near the city.

The deadly driver has been charged with serious crimes, but not with first-degree murder. We’ll know more about his connections to others on the extreme right as the investigation unfolds.

Both sides came prepared for violence, wearing protective helmets, masks and carrying flags. When violence broke out, many of the flags were stripped from the wood handles and the handles were used as clubs.

Both sides brought street medics equipped with bandages and fluids for flushing eyes and skin afflicted with pepper spray.

Alt-right demonstrators arrived at Emancipation Park around 9 a.m. with several counter-protesters already present. While the demonstrators milled about the park waving flags, several protesters prayed nearby and others sang while state police ringed the marchers to keep the sides separate inside the park.

One right-wing group in military garb, carrying rifles and wearing pistols, stood between the pro-white demonstrators and counter-protesters….

One African-American reporter was punched by an alt-right demonstrator wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Protesters pelted the alt-right marchers trying to enter the park with balloons filled with paint and both sides hurled water bottles, some with urine inside, and other makeshift missiles at each other. As more scuffles broke out, the two sides began clubbing each other with the flag poles, sticks and makeshift clubs. Others threw road flares and other items across Market Street at each other. –Daily Progress, Charlottesville

Comment:ZipDialog always tries to highlight the best local reporting. In this case, as in so many, the local journalism is more informative than the national, fly-in reporters.

◆President Trump’s condemnation of the violence from “many sides” has been sharply criticized (including by many Republicans) for failing to single out white nationalists.

[Rice’s] opinion piece in the New York Times is titled, “It’s Not Too Late on North Korea.” A better title, though, is this: “Why America’s So Happy Barack Obama’s Gone.”

Delusion is her middle name. Rice was the lady, after all, who kept trying to sell America, post-Sept. 11, 2012, fatal attack on America’s compound in Benghazi, that the radical Muslim uprising that left U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and three other brave U.S. officials dead was due to a 14-minute YouTube video on the truths of Islam. Delusion then, delusion now. –Chumley in the Washington Times (link here)

They ask: How can two leaders from the same party fight? After all, they note, Harry Reid did whatever President Obama asked and, if he needed to blow up the Senate to do it, he did.

My view: Trump’s prodding of McConnell is perfectly reasonable for two reasons.

First, the American system, as designed by Madison and the Founders, hinges on the separation of the Congress and President. The presumption was–and is–that they have institutional stakes in preserving their own separate powers. If either could monopolize power, the path to tyranny would be open, or so the Founders thought. With that logic in mind, we should expect–indeed, we should desire–some clashes between the Executive and Legislative. The trouble, really, has been its steady erosion of this separation by an increasingly powerful presidency, as well as the growth of a poorly-controlled fourth branch of government, federal bureaucracies.

Second, Trump is right in highlighting the Senate’s inaction and hypocrisy. They voted for big items like “repeal and replace” only when they knew Pres. Obama would veto the bill. When they finally had a president who would sign the bill, they seized up. Trump did not ram a particular healthcare bill down their throats. Congress was largely free to write the bill by themselves. And they failed.

If they think voters aren’t furious about this mess, they are sadly mistaken. I share that disgust.

The organizers of the Loft Literary Center’s conference, aimed at teaching people how to write young adult novels, scrapped their plans when they learned that all the speakers but one were white, reports the [Minneapolis] Star Tribune.

“We have set a goal for ourselves to be inclusive and to work toward equity, and we didn’t think the conference would live up to that mission,” Britt Udesen, executive director of the Loft, said Wednesday. “We made a mistake.” –Daily Caller

Comment: Makes perfect sense. Why in the world would you want to teach people to write novels after the horrifying discovery that the teachers were white?

No, it is far better to cancel this abomination and toss the students out onto an ice flow.

But that is not sufficient. Are the organizers to waltz away scot-free? Nay, I say.

They should be sent to labor in the rice fields and learn wisdom and humility from the peasantry. Only then will our Cultural Revolution be complete.

The bill aims to prioritize workers’ skills over family ties, and amounts to the “most significant reform to our immigration system in half a century,” Trump said. The goal of the bill would be to knock down the number of legal immigrants admitted into the U.S. each year from about 1 million to 500,000 by 2027.

The RAISE bill would cut out the four-tiered family immigration category for green cards, paving way for a new merit-based system that prioritizes high-skilled workers who have a high level of English and “entrepreneurial initiative.” –ABC News

Comment: The two central elements of the bill are inherently separable. Shifting to a merit-based system does not entail raising or lowering the number of people legally admitted. If lower-skilled workers are still needed for some jobs, then an amendment could admit them on a temporary basis–but only if there was some tough measures to ensure they left after that period. Right now, there aren’t.

Bipartisan support? Not a chance. The Democrats are already lining up to say how racist it is. It isn’t.

What’s interesting is that the cutbacks will clear bolster employment opportunities and wages for lower-income Americans–precisely the people Democrats claim they want to help. Unfortunately for Democrats, it cuts into Hispanic immigration, or, to put it differently, into the Identity Politics that is now the true heart of the party. Forced to choose between Identity Politics and Lower-income workers (including many blacks and Hispanics), the Democrats are going with Identity.

Interesting question: will African-American Democrats go along? My bet is that they will, but that they will try to keep a low profile to avoid attention from their voters (who will be harmed). Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders will say, “If blacks and Hispanic members split on this, we’ll lose our leverage.”

Actually, they don’t have any leverage. The real leverage will come from the US Chamber of Commerce, and it will be on Republicans, some of whom will cave.

Comment: It is blindingly obvious, at least to me, that these universities discriminate against Asian-Americans. Just look at their percentages (15-25%), compared to about 50% at Berkeley, which is legally prohibited from such discrimination–and would have a hard time doing it politically in California. Granted, California has more Asian-Americans, but the proportions at the Ivies are out of whack.

My guess is that the admissions departments say what they did about Jews 60 years ago: “We just have too many of these students who score 800 in math, 700 in verbal, and play the violin. They just aren’t ‘well-rounded.’ ” No matter that these students’ parents, like Jewish parents of an earlier generation, had modest incomes, encouraged their bright kids to study hard, and then watched as Harvard and Princeton smacked them down for far less-qualified students.

The only argument in Harvard’s favor is one they would never use: we are a private university and, until the government nationalizes us, we can set our own damned admissions standards, even if you think they are unfair.

The government’s response, “Hey, buddy, nice genetic research program you got there. Hate to see all the money taken away from it.” That, of course, is how the government enforces its Title IX rules on athletic programs.

State NAACP leaders told the [Kansas City] Star that the decision to issue the advisory was made after recent legislation passed in the state which makes it harder to win discrimination suits, the longtime and continued racial disparities in traffic enforcement, and a number of incidents that exemplify harm coming to both minority residents and minority visitors to the state. –The Root

◆ Donald Trump, Jr., says he, Paul Manafort, and other campaign aides met with a Russian lawyer. The New York Times (here) and Washington Post (here) both play this as big news, but they don’t explain why. The Russian lawyer is connected to Putin’s circle, though it is not clear if Jr. or others knew. It was a brief meeting (20 minutes) and mostly raised the issue of resuming US adoptions in Russia.

Comment: There are two reasons the meeting could be significant.

First, Trump’s people had earlier denied any meetings at all. There was at least this one brief meeting. Were there more? Did they go anywhere?

Second, there is speculation (at the Daily Beast) the meeting was surreptitiously set up by a Democratic group, the Fusion GPS people. These are the fine folks who produced the dicey dossier on Trump. We don’t know a lot about Fusion GPS, including which Democrats paid for their services and why they were hired, but they seem to be part of an opposition research program. If that speculation pans out, then it looks like the Democrats were leading Trump’s people into a trap–not because anything really happened at the meeting but because the mere fact of a meeting with Russians looks bad in this increasingly anti-Russian environment.

In Iraq, the group still controls Tal Afar, Hawija, other towns and much of Anbar Province. In Syria, most of its top operatives have fled Raqqa in the past six months for other towns still under ISIS control in the Euphrates River valley . . . .

Many have relocated to Mayadeen, a town 110 miles southeast of Raqqa near oil facilities and with supply lines through the surrounding desert. They have taken with them the group’s most important recruiting, financing, propaganda and external operations functions, American officials said. Other leaders have been spirited out of Raqqa by a trusted network of aides. –New York Times

Comment: About 18% of the ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and North America involved fighters who returned from the battlefield. The other 82% were terrorists who had not been on the battlefield but were “inspired” by ISIS propaganda and radical imams, either in-person on online.

Since these are typically low-tech attacks on soft targets, such as pedestrians on sidewalks, they are very hard to stop.

Local Roots, a California company, has created an indoor farm that can turn any produce into local produce, anywhere. They grow fruits and vegetables in shipping containers that are stacked in old warehouses or parking lots, which can either be connected to the grid or, eventually, powered by solar energy. Local Roots has designed the custom growing technology and hardware, and it owns and operates the farms, selling its produce to restaurants and food distributors under its own brand. The fact that the company is vertically integrated differentiates it from other container farming systems. . . .

Local Roots has figured out how to make the farm efficient enough that it can sell produce at a comparable cost to conventionally-grown fruits and veggies.

Comment: The parents are absolutely right. But the impact of the “parental veto” is probably exaggerated.

There is no evidence that top schools like Brown are pinched–or intend to change. They still get the cream-of-the-SAT-crop and teach them to march in lock-step ideologically.

◆ Corrupt Illinois totters along: Passed the first budget in two years, huge tax increases, ZERO reforms As the Chicago Tribune reports:

Illinois’ bruising two-year run without a state budget is over, but business leaders are left feeling they got the short end of the stick: higher taxes with virtually none of the regulatory and political changes they sought.

The $36.1 billion budget plan increases the corporate income tax rate to 7 percent from 5.25 percent and the personal rate to 4.95 percent from 3.75 percent. –Chicago Tribune

Comment: The Democrats delivered for the public-sector unions and shafted taxpayers, once again.

It was actually quite eloquent, especially in its recitation of Poland’s uprising against the Nazis in August 1944 and the Soviet Army waiting across the river until the Nazis killed all of them. It offered a clear statement about the achievements of the West–achievements worth defending. And it promised strong US participation in NATO.

It offered a sharp criticism of Putin’s expansive foreign policy and the risks it posed in Europe and the Middle East

“If my side is unable to agree on an adequate replacement, then some kind of action with regard to private health insurance markets must occur,” McConnell said at a Rotary Club meeting in Kentucky on Thursday, according to multiple reports.

Comment: In other words, I’ll work with the Democrats to do something. In that case, the Republicans might defect.

The groups were apparently reacting to comments made several years ago by former CEO Howard Schultz in support of gay rights that drew renewed attention amid an increasingly anti-LGBT climate in both of the predominantly Muslim countries. –Chicago Tribune

Comment: Gee, I hope this isn’t a setback for “intersectionality” among US progressives.

A Palestinian official on Wednesday said there are no plans to stop making payments to families of Palestinians who have been convicted of killing Israelis, contradicting comments by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

[Conductor Riccardo Muti] gave one example of the kind of restoration Mr. Gossett specialized in: Traditional productions of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” had the lascivious Duke of Mantua appear at a tavern in the last act and ask for “Una stanza, e del vino” (“A room, and some wine”), a seemingly innocuous request that is oddly met with disgust by the others on stage. –New York Times

The obituary also contains a smidgen of Gossett’s family history that deserves mention:

Mr. Gossett was born on Sept. 27, 1941, in Brooklyn to Harold and Pearl Gossett. His father was a furrier. After his family moved to Queens, he attended Forest Hills High School.

Mr. Gossett graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, earned his doctorate from Princeton University after spending a year in Paris as a Fulbright scholar, and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1968, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. –NYT

Comment: Why mention that background? Because it shows an extremely smart kid from an immigrant family in the New York Boroughs, educated in public school, eager to spend his life in the high arts. He did that with great distinction and creativity, as a professor, a consultant to symphonies and opera houses, and as Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Allan Bloom’s background was similar, coming from lower-middle class roots in Indianapolis. (His parent were social workers). Allan always said that coming to Chicago as an undergraduate opened an intellectual banquet for him. I always thought Allan’s cri de coeur, The Closing of the American Mind, grew out of his incredulity and then disgust that later generations of students did not appreciate the great works and learning set before them. Worse, he thought, they combined ignorance and contempt.

Philip Gossett was my backyard neighbor, a colleague at the university, and a member of my synagogue. May his memory be a blessing.

◆ England’s third major terror attack in 10 weeks raises fundamental questions about how to prevent these assaults

Comment: Kudos to the London police for their immediate response. It was swift, sure, and effective. 8 minutes from first incident to squads arriving in force. Their swift action prevented countless additional casualties.

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The problem is how to prevent these attacks, both in the short run (surveillance, arrests, etc.) and long run (tougher restrictions on immigration and rethinking the obvious failure to integrate the communities into the liberal west).

All Europe is facing a high threat from Islamic extremists, many (like the Manchester bomber) born in the very Western countries they are terrorizing.

As ISIS is squeezed abroad, they will try to revive their organization by killing in Europe.

Ordinary Europeans will refuse to live in perpetual terror and demand answers from their failing political leaders.

◆ US media reported the London attack, wall-to-wall, but buried one aspect of the story. Any guesses? You are correct.

Comment: Tax reform is essential, and the Republicans know it, not just for the economy but for their reelection.

On healthcare, the pressure in late autumn, when next year’s premium notices go out, will be enormous. Obamacare is melting down, and that means suffering. The Republicans will point at Obama and the D’s. But that won’t cut it. People elected the R’s to fix it.

For some reason, not everyone thought this white-leave-campus thing was a good idea.

One long-time progressive, Prof. Bret Weinstein, did not favor it. And he didn’t like the students’ demands that new academic hires deemphasize academic ability and focus on race/gender/undocumented/social justice/etc.

As you can imagine, those opposed to Weinstein were not looking for a debate.